Sparks: DR Congo's healthcare workers go on strike as Ebola epidemic spreads
Observations at the bedside reveal that the most virulent contagion is not the fever itself, but the professional negligence that expects a physician to bleed his own life for a system that denies him his bread.
Watching my own hand tremble at the thought of a neighbor's pox, I find it no marvel that a man refuses to walk into the furnace when his masters treat his labor as a gift rather than a debt.
Things that are truly hateful: a physician’s robe stained with the fluids of the dying while his own stomach remains quite empty, and a pale official who speaks of duty from a room scented with expensive wood.
The proof follows a simple geometric Necessity: if the center fails to provide the ratio of resources required for the circumference to hold, the entire circle of public safety must inevitably collapse into chaos.
No society can be flourishing and happy of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable, yet we expect the surgeon to ignore his own interest while the magistrate neglects the most basic contract.
Democratic equality creates a strange paradox where the state demands total sacrifice from its citizens while the centralized administration loses the habit of fulfilling its most elementary obligations to those who serve it.
Men in clean coats write laws about the sanctity of life while allowing the man who actually touches the sores of the dying to perish from hunger, proving that our entire civilization is built upon a monstrous lie.
The health of the city is a tension of opposing forces, where the upward flow of the epidemic meets the downward exhaustion of the healers, and the balance breaks when the silver ceases to move.
Travel teaches that while the judges in every land speak of the law, the true measure of a Sultan’s justice is whether the healers in his markets are fed or left to beg while the pestilence nears.
When the greening power of the soul is parched by the greed of the high-born, the vessels of healing crack and the black bile of the earth rises unchecked to wither the garden of the living.
That a government should expect the preservation of the public health while violating the natural right of the laborer to his hire is a contradiction that no rational architecture of state can long endure.
Power that forgets its debt to the humble eventually finds itself powerless against the fever, for the authority that avoids accountability always ends by destroying the very instruments of its own survival.
Consider the nurse who must choose between the contagion of the ward and the starvation of her children, and you will see the failure of the state’s economy more clearly than in any ledger of the treasury.
It is a most efficient policy to withhold the wages of those treating the plague, as the subsequent strike will allow the disease to eliminate the surplus population without further administrative expense to the crown.
Every village I pass shows the same grim inventory of empty cupboards and overflowing infirmaries, where the brave souls battling the heat of the fever are left without even the meager coin required for a bowl of grain.
They say the government is deeply concerned about the spread of the disease, and they prove it by making sure the doctors are too hungry to stand up and get in the way of it.
"The ministry remains committed to the stabilization of the region," they write, while the very hands that stabilize the dying are forced to drop their tools because the ink in the ledger has replaced the bread on the table.